Recommended Feminist Literature for Birth through 18

“However bad this is, it’s always the very best time that there has ever been.”
-Melissa Harris-Perry
(from p.15 of Marianne Schnall’s What Will it Take to Make a Woman President?)

The 2014 Amelia Bloomer Project list highlights the power of the individual and the collective voices of women across time and around the world. We celebrate the legacy of Lynn Povich and her female colleagues who resisted the patriarchy of mass media. The Riot Grrrls of the 1990s introduced a new generation of young women to the right and importance of expressing themselves with loud and unapologetic voices. And today, Tavi Gevinson and her Rookie contributors challenge mainstream media and insist on using their unique talents to claim their share of the global conversation.

Powerful manifestations of contemporary, global feminist movements improving the lives of girls and women include Sampat Pal and her Gulabi Gang in India, and the work of Dr. Hawa Abdi in Somalia. Rather than being silenced by tyranny, Malala Yousafzai became an internationally recognized advocate for the rights of girls. Highlighting the value and potential of our youngest audience, a board book from the Global Fund for Children is a top ten title. Through feminist treatments of traditional tales, swashbuckling heroines, and fictional and biographical portrayals of female scientists and artists who refused to accept limited opportunities, the books on this list examine the feminist experience across genre and age.

Fifteen year old Faten’s father forces her to leave school to work as a maid. Despite rigid Lebanese social expectations and an unsupportive family, Faten forges ahead to pursue her dream of becoming a nurse.

Denny inherits her grandfather’s passions for dogsledding and preserving their Native culture. Despite being told that girls don’t sled, she participates in the Great Race, an epic competition in the Alaskan wilderness.

A fourteen-year-old Sudanese refugee and an American teenager become pen pals for a year. Although their circumstances are vastly different, they come to understand that “when a tree leans, it will rest on its sister.”

The Brontë sisters rocked Victorian society with their progressive and unconventional writing.

*Schnall, Marianne. What Will It Take To Make a Woman President? 2013. 386p. Seal Press, $17.00 (978-1-5800-5496-6). Gr.10-up.

After her young daughter asks why a woman has never been president, Schnall interviews a variety of public figures who reflect on the obstacles to this goal and explore how to make this dream a reality.

*Yousafzai, Malala with Christina Lamb. I am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban. 2013. 327p. Little, Brown and Company, $26.00 (978-0-3163-2240-9). Gr.8-up.

Recovered from her attack, Malala Yousafzai has come back stronger than ever, engaging in consciousness-raising and serving as an inspiration to girls and women all over the world.

16 thoughts on “Announcing the 2014 Amelia Bloomer Project List”

Reblogged this on Strong in the Broken Places and commented:
The Amelia Bloomer Project celebrates children’s & YA books with kick-ass heroines, as far as I can tell. This looks like a great list of 2014 books.

Unfortunately, outsiders to Native culture often inject feminist sensibilities of that outsider status into their stories. That is the case with Parry’s WRITTEN IN STONE. There are other problems with the book, too. As Native people, we contend with “information” about who we are/were that uninformed people get from books like this one. It means people have to “unlearn” what they think they know about us. That pile of stuff-to-unlearn is already so high that it is disappointing that an author who taught Native children would commit that same error. There’s a long conversation between myself and the author at my website, American Indians in Children’s Literature.